I stood up--"Dear Sir!--Dear Miss!" said I.
"What's the matter, my love?" said Mr. B. smiling.
"Why have I wept the distresses of the injured Hermione?" whispered I:
"why have I been moved by the murder of the brave Pyrrhus, and shocked
by the madness of Orestes! Is it for this? See you not Hector's
widow, the noble Andromache, inverting the design of the whole play,
satirizing her own sex, but indeed most of all ridiculing and shaming,
in _my_ mind, that part of the audience, who can be delighted with
this vile epilogue, after such scenes of horror and distress?"
He was pleased to say, smiling, "I expected, my dear, that your
delicacy, and Miss Darnford's too, would be shocked on this
preposterous occasion. I never saw this play, rake as I was, but the
impropriety of the epilogue sent me away dissatisfied with it, and
with human nature too: and you only see, by this one instance, what a
character that of an actor or actress is, and how capable they are to
personate any thing for a sorry subsistence."
"Well, but, Sir," said I, "are there not, think you, extravagant
scenes and characters enough in most plays to justify the censures
of the virtuous upon them, that the wicked friend of the author must
crown the work in an epilogue, for fear the audience should go away
improved by the representation? It is not, I see, always narrowness of
spirit, as I have heard some say, that opens the mouths of good people
against these diversions.
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